In the course of the Renaissance, Italian emerged as a national literary language, competing with and eventually supplanting Latin as the normal medium of expression in poetry, prose, and drama. Such a major cultural upheaval was necessarily protracted and complex, and in spite of the achievements of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, many issues remained unresolved into the 15th and 16th centuries. In this volume, Italian and British scholars address a wide variety of linguistic and stylistic topics in Italian Renaissance writing, analyzing general trends, major writers (including Dante, Petrarch, Alberti, Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Tasso), and also lesser-known figures who illustrate the diverse possibilities open to writers of the time.